(Answering via groups.yahoo.com, since I seems to miss the latest
messages. Mmm, it is just slow, I received Daniel's response to the
original message of John before the first message of this thread...)
--- In lua-l@y..., ramsdell@l... (John D. Ramsdell) wrote:
> Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers@d...> writes:
>
> > Lua /is/ easy to install, perhaps not for people who don't know
what they're
> > doing when they install software which isn't pre-packaged, but
then again,
> > is that such a bad thing?
>
> This is false. Lua is not easy to install. For autoconfig'ed
> systems, one simply types:
>
> $ ./configure
> $ make
> $ make install
>
> There are no instructions to read, and the process can be automated.
> This is what it means for software to be easily installed.
As you say: "For autoconfig'ed systems". I am no specialist, but I
think that for systems that doesn't have /bin/sh (Windows, perhaps
others like BeOS or MacOS), it doesn't work.
And from what I see in the libraries I downloaded (eg. cURL,
ImageMagick, PCRE), configure files sum up to hundred of KBs! For
ImageMagick, configure file alone = 420KB! That's quite big for such
a result.
> The current Lua install method requires that one edit it's makefile.
> The makefile has it's own conventions that are different from every
> other package. It's a waste of time to ask programmers to go
through
> this process.
>
> Autoconf solved this problem a long time ago. It's well tested
> software that is accepted by the community. There is a reason so
many
> people use it.
>
> John
Well, the makefile of Lua is quite stable, so why don't you create
and distribute separately an autoconf package for Lua? It makes a
double download, but at least it won't bloat the official
distribution for those which don't need/cannot use these files.
Regards.